HY 150 BISK
REVOLUTION IN IDEAS
THE ROMANTIC PROTEST TO THE MODERN WORLD
http://users.ju.edu/jclarke/hy150biskromanticism.htm

The crucial goal of all my courses is to create an environment where you, as the student, can begin to feel comfortable taking responsibility for your own education


JOURNAL 5 QUESTIONS

After reading the material below, please answer the following questions in your journal:
1. Romantic thinkers, musicians, writers, and artists perceived the world very differently than did Enlightenment thinkers, musicians, writers, and artists. Elaborate on the ideas of each and describe these differences between these two world views.  Be sure to give examples of specific people and their works.

A. THE TRIPLE REVOLUTION AND THE ORIGINS OF THE MODERN WEST, 1789-1848
A Triple Revolution—industrial and economic, political and social, intellectual and cultural—slowly, and not so slowly, supplanted the values associated with Europe's Old Regimes. This Triple Revolution included:

1. The Bourgeois Political and Social Revolution
The French Revolution, 1789-1815, spearheaded the political manifestation of the Bourgeois Revolution. The ideals revealed by the Revolutionaries continue to inspire modern civilization.  These include:
a. Liberty
b. Fraternity (that is, nationalism)
c. Equality
But the revolutionary demands have proved to be fundamentally incompatible. We can explain much, even most, modern violence in terms of people trying to work out the contradictions among these three slogans.

2. The Industrial Revolution and the Rise of Wage Labor
The factory changed the ways people worked and lived—their entire relationship to the environment. Humans became masters of Time and of the Earth itself. The Industrial Revolution, by exchanging human and animal power for mechanical, steam, electrical, petroleum, and nuclear power, enabled a dramatic increase in per capita and aggregate productive potential. For the first time, common people can hope for improved standards of living and society can think in terms of material progress. The pace of change increasingly accelerates every year.

3. Ideological Thought
People needed new “Religions” to explain and justify the new ways in which they lived. These new faiths intertwine in complicated ways. But life itself had become incredibly more complicated, and, hence, making sense of life had become not just complicated, but contradictory as well. New ways of life created new problems which demanded innovative solutions.  The new “Religions” include:
a. Romanticism.  Romanticism is a reaction to the classicism of the Enlightenment.  More on the Romantics below.
b. Liberalism.  Liberalism’s founding fathers include Smith, Ricardo, Malthus.  More on them elsewhere.
c. Idealism.  Hegel is an important Idealist. Idealism refers to the “Idea.” Idealism is any theory affirming the central importance in reality of the mind, the spirit, and ideal (that is, of the idea). Idealism regards reality as either essentially spiritual or as embodying mind or reason.  Idealism identifies reality with perception and rejects the possibility of knowing anything except the mental life.
d. Materialism. Materialism says there is no reality beyond physical matter; nothing exists beyond what the five senses can perceive.  Physical reality is worth knowing; it is knowable; and it is the only "reality." There is no "idea." Without materialism, science cannot exist. Western society rests on two pillars. One is the materialist rationality of the Greeks. The human mind and reason can answer all questions. Materialism and its child, Science, connote no purpose. The other pillar is the theistic explanations of the ancient Hebrews. Nothing can be explained except through the "Hand of God," which constantly intervenes in human affairs. There is purpose to existence—God's purpose. Ultimately, material reality is less important than God's reality. Life is but a brief, and unimportant, reality compared with Eternity.
e. Science. Science is a branch of study concerned with observation and classification of facts and especially with establishing quantitative formulations of verifiable general laws chiefly by induction and hypothesis. The "Scientific Method" seeks to disprove hypotheses. As long as an hypothesis appears to explain observations of the material world and as long as we cannot disprove the hypothesis, we assume the hypothesis to be true. Once one or the other of these criteria fail, then we must seek a new hypothesis. Note the fundamental difference between the deductive logic of religion and the inductive methodology of science. Because science can deal only with things that we can measure and describe mathematically, science is incapable of dealing with the "ultimate questions" of the good, the beautiful, and the true.
f. Nationalism.  Nationalism is an emotional sense of loyalty to the group—the modern nation-state.  People find this loyalty in a common sense of identity through their common history, language, culture, religion, citizenship, and race.  The French Revolution and Napoleon's conquests stimulated the rising nationalism in Europe.
g. Conservatism.  Upset at the violence of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars and the crassness of the rising bourgeois society, many of the nobility, for example, Metternich, argue for a return to a God-ordained, hierarchal society.  Once again governed by their “betters,” the people’s passions would cool and peace and prosperity would return to society.
h. Socialism.  Appalled by the injustice of liberal, capitalist society, many turned to various kinds of socialism.  Marx is one example, and more on him later.
i. Religious Revival. Reacting against the hyper-rationalism of the Enlightenment and then Liberalism, plus the violence of their children—the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars—many turn to religious revivalism.  This includes a return to traditional Catholicism and the rise of Evangelical Protestantism.

B. OVERVIEW OF ROMANTICISM
1. NEGATIVISM AND EXTREMISM
a. Difficulty of Definition
It is difficult to define Romanticism as it meant many different things to everyone; even the Romantics' self-definitions are often so irrational as to frustrate any systematic definition. In its narrow sense it emerged as a self-conscious and militant trend in the arts. Romanticism and the protest movement associated with it is usually dated from 1780 to 1830, while the revolutionary years of 1830 to 1848 saw its greatest European vogue.

b. Negativism
It is easier to describe what Romanticism was against. It was an extremist creed opposed to the middle. We can find Romantics on the political left and the right, but rarely among the moderates, or Whig-liberals.  They avoided the rationalist center which remained the stronghold of classicism.  Classicists believed that the ancient Greek and Roman standards of moderation, balance, and rationality remained the supreme arbiters of good taste and form.  For them, the Greeks and Romans had discovered eternally valid aesthetic rules that playwrights and painters should follow.

c. General Definition
A belief in emotional exuberance, unrestrained imagination, and spontaneity in both art and personal life characterizes Romanticism.

In Germany, early Romantics of the 1770s and 1780s called themselves the "Storm and Stress" group, and many Romantic artists of the early 19th century lived lives of tremendous emotional intensity. Suicide, duels to the death, madness, and strange illnesses were not uncommon among leading Romantics. Romantic artists typically led bohemian lives, wearing their hair long and uncombed in preference to powdered wigs and living in cold garrets rather than frequenting stiff drawing rooms. They rejected materialism and sought to escape to lofty spiritual heights through their art.

Great individualists, the Romantics believed the full development of one's unique human potential to be the supreme purpose in life. Their sense of an unlimited universe and their yearning for the unattained, the unknown, the unknowable drove the Romantics.

2. REACTION AND COUNTERREVOLUTION, 1815-30
a. Intellectual-Cultural Reaction
The reaction against the Enlightenment took the form of the Romantic Movement.  Romantic writers and artists protested first against the rationalism—the belief what is reasonable should guide people in their thought and action and second against classicism—that is, going back to Greek and Roman models.

By 1815, Europe was reacting against the French Revolution, which had made Napoleon possible, and against the Enlightenment, which many believed had made the Revolution possible.

The Romantics championed faith, emotion, tradition, and other values associated with the distant past—revolutionaries often look to the past. As opposed to the revolutionary wish to throw off the dead hand of the past, the Romantics saw humanity as having emotional ties to the past, which provide a sense of community and give stability to human institutions. They were revolting against the narrowness of the 18th century—the emphasis on the purely logical, on the tightly ordered rules of poetry and prose, the unimaginative approach to history, science, and politics.

The Romantics accused the Enlightenment of being unduly optimistic about the perfectibility of human nature and argued that people can also find pleasure in the grotesque, the disorganized, and the irrational in life.

God exists and people find God in Nature, not in Science. Reason, while important, takes its instruction from intuition.

b. Political Reaction
The political counterrevolution came of age at the Congress of Vienna, 1814-15, where the leaders of the last coalition against Napoleon reestablished an European balance of power, and repudiated revolutionary principles. Reason and Natural Law, according to political leaders and Romantics, had led not only to material progress, but also to the Reign of Terror and Napoleonic imperialism.  (Natural Law was the idea first developed by the ancient Greeks and one of the cornerstones to Western civilization.  People can understand the material world by using reason informed by the five senses. Implicit in this notion are also the ideas that the material world is real and is significant. Humans can make sense of the seeming confusion of the natural world once they understand the appropriate Natural Law. Science would be impossible without a notion of Natural Law, without the notion that the universe moves through mechanics rather than through the unseen hand of God, that is, miracles.).

c. Critique of Bourgeois Society
Romantics originally did not oppose bourgeois society. Only after the bourgeoisie had triumphed in the French and Industrial Revolutions did Romanticism become its instinctive enemy. Logical, rational descriptions of contemporary life were not the Romantics' forte, but they often penetrated more deeply to the heart of changing society than did the more scientifically-minded empiricists of the day. Two groups led the protest against bourgeois society:
1. Displaced, alienated youth.
2. Alienated, solitary, artistic geniuses.
Both groups reveled in being misunderstood and worked hard to shock complacent bourgeois society.

Of these Romantic critiques, the most lasting were the concept of human alienation and efforts to create a perfect society of the future. Both become important to the ideas of Karl Marx.

d. Regaining Man's Lost Harmony in the World
But which past?

1. Lost Harmony of Primitive Man and the Middle Ages
If bourgeois society had corrupted the human community, then it becomes humanity's job to return to the purer, simpler, more satisfying past. Romantics believed that the Folk of pre-civilized primitives or of the Middle Ages lived in earthly paradise destroyed by the bourgeois world. These pre-industrial peasants or craftsmen exemplified uncorrupted virtues and its language, customs, songs, and stories were the true repository of the soul of the people.

Heroes of Romanticism: observed by a portrait of Byron and bust of Beethoven, Liszt plays for friends. From left to right sit Alexander Dumas, George Sand (characteristically wearing men’s garb), and Marie d’Agoult, Liszt’s mistress. Standing are Victor Hugo, Paganini, and Rossini.
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The Folk could be a revolutionary concept, especially among the oppressed peoples about to discover their national identity. The Folk's simple virtues, for example, faith in pope or tsar, could make it a conservative force, although by the end of the 19th century, this faith was more true in the intellectuals' imaginations than in political reality.

The Primitive existed in every village.  He was a potential revolutionary concept defining an assumed golden, communistic past and human freedom. Noble Savage, such as the American Indian that Jean-Jacques Rousseau had held as the ideal of free, social man. To the Socialists, primitive society provided the model for utopia. Marx's triple division of history—primitive communism, class society, communism on the higher, post-bourgeois level—follows this tradition.

2. Nature
Nowhere was the break with classicism more apparent than in Romanticism's general conception of nature. Nature did not interest the Classicists. In the words of the 18th-century English author Samuel Johnson, "A blade of grass is always a blade of grass; men and women are my subjects of inquiry." Classicists portrayed Nature as beautiful and chaste, like an 18th-century formal garden. The formal garden, in truth, supplies a great metaphor for the Enlightenment: Nature is unruly until man discovers the laws of Nature (Natural Laws) and brings Nature under man's control.

Nature, on the other hand, enchanted the Romantics. Most Romantics saw the growth of modern industry as an ugly, brutal attack on their beloved nature and on the human personality. They sought escape—in the unspoiled Lake District of northern England, in exotic North Africa, in an idealized Middle Ages.

Yet, some Romantics found a vast, awesome, terribly moving power in the new industrial landscape. In ironworks and cotton mills they saw the flames of hell and the evil genius of Satan himself.

One of John Martin's last and greatest paintings was The Great Day of His Wrath (1850). It vividly depicts the Last Judgment foretold in Revelation 6, when the "sun became black as sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth."

A journey through the "Black Country" of the industrial Midlands in the dead of night inspired Martin's Romantic masterpiece. According to Martin's son: "The glow of the furnaces, the red blaze of light, with the liquid fire, seemed to him truly sublime and awful. He could not imagine anything more terrible even in the regions of everlasting punishment. All he had done or tried in ideal painting fell far short, very far short, of the fearful sublimity." See http://www.artunframed.com/john_martin.htm

3. The French Revolutionary Tradition
The spirit of 1789 did not die in 1815. It inspired revolutionary outbreaks in the 1820s, 1830, and 1848. The 1848 Revolutions, though crushed, marked a critical turning point in the development of the liberalism and nationalism bequeathed by the French Revolution. With time, the excesses of the French Revolution dimmed and even Napoleon himself entered mythology as a liberator.

The most striking outcome of this merging of Romanticism with a vision of a new and higher French Revolution was especially visible in the overwhelming victory of political art between 1830-48. Several artists became political figures, prophets, and national symbols: for example, Chopin and Liszt.

Aesthetic theories during this period spoke of the unity of art and social commitment—that is, the politization of art the unhappy culmination of which was Stalin's Socialist Realism.)

3. CONTRIBUTIONS
a. Romanticism and Science (Helps lead to Marx)
1. The Continuance of the 17th-18th Centuries Rationalist Tradition
The Enlightenment's rationalists showed that just as people can discover laws to explain the physical universe, so too they can divine laws explain human behavior. The Enlightenment’s earliest triumph was to build a systematic, deductive theory of political economy, which was already far advanced by 1798, for example, Adam Smith. Transcending morality, these laws are amoral.

2. History
Fascinated by color and diversity, the Romantic imagination turned toward the study and writing of history with a passion. For Romantics, history was not a minor branch of philosophy from which philosophers picked suitable examples to explain their teachings. History was beautiful, exciting, and important in its own right.

History was the art of change over time—the key to a universe now seen as organic and dynamic. Romantics no longer History as mechanical and static as the philosophes of the 18th-century Enlightenment had seen it. The Romantics discovered History as a process of logical evolution and not merely a chronological succession of events. History became a rigorous academic subject. Philology became the first science to regard evolution as its core. Biology and geology tried to advance evolutionary theories but ran into biblical resistance.

Historical studies supported the development of national aspirations and encouraged entire peoples to seek in the past their special destinies. This trend was especially strong in Germany and Eastern Europe. As the famous English historian Lord Acton put it, the growth of historical thinking associated with the Romantic Movement was a most fateful step in the story of European thought.

b. Revolutionary Qualities
1. The Romantics' emphasis on the individual ultimately enriched the doctrine of liberalism.
2. Their emphasis on the historical evolution of communities strengthened nationalism.
3. Their emphasis on cultural rather than political history led to broader theories and to a greater attempt to grasp all human motivation, rather than to interpret the causes of events predominantly in political or economic terms.
4. The major immediate political influence was to lend support to God and King against republicanism and anti-clericalism.

H. ART OF THE ENLIGHTENMENT
Art reveals the interests and values of society and frequently gives intimate and unique glimpses of how people actually lived. In portraits and statues, whether of saints, generals, philosophers, popes, poets, or merchants, it preserves the memory and fame of men and women who shaped society. In paintings, drawings, and carvings, it also shows how people worked, played, relaxed, suffered, and triumphed. Art, therefore, is extremely useful to the historian, especially for periods when written records are scarce. Every work of art and every part of it has meaning and has something of its own to say.

Art also manifests the changes and continuity of European life; as values changed in Europe, so did major artistic themes. In the 18th century, some artists recalled the Renaissance by choosing to focus on aristocratic lifestyles and interests. Some painters developed the Rococo style, whose elements reflected the elegant refinement of Enlightenment culture.

BERNARD DE FONTENELLE (1657-1757) (A Pre-Romantic)

The ideas of the Scientific Revolution often reached the educated circles of Europe through popularizers, not through the works of the scientists themselves. The most important of the popularizers was Bernard de Fontenelle who, while not a scientist himself, had much knowledge of scientific matters. One of his most popular works, the Plurality of Worlds, was set in the form of an intimate dialogue between a lady and her lover underneath the stars. "Tell me," she exclaims, "about these stars of yours." Her lover proceeds to tell her of the tremendous advances in cosmology after the foolish errors of their forebears:

There came on the scene a certain German [sic.], one Copernicus, who made short work of all those various circles, all those solid skies, which the ancients had pictured to themselves. The former he abolished; the latter, he broke in pieces. Fired with the noble zeal of a true astronomer, he took the earth and spun it very far away from the center of the universe, where it had been installed, and in that center he put the sun, which had a far better title to the honor.

In the course of two evenings under the stars, the lady learned the basic fundamentals of the new mechanistic universe, which, as presented in Fontenelle's summary of Newton, resembled a watch. Scores of the educated elite of Europe learned along with Fontenelle's lady.

Thanks to Fontenelle, science was no longer the monopoly of experts, but part of literature. He was especially fond of down-playing the religious backgrounds of the 17th-century scientists. Himself a skeptic, Fontenelle portrayed the churches as enemies of scientific progress, adding to the growing skepticism of religion at the end of the 17th century.

III. ROMANTIC ART
See  http://www.navigo.com/wm/paint/auth/ and http://www.artunframed.com and http://www.hol.gr/cgfa/index.html and  http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/default.htm
The Romantic artists of the 18th- and 19th-centuries, however, rejected materialism and, driven by a sense of an unlimited universe, sought to reach new levels of spiritual understanding through their art. The Romantic Movement testified to a turbulent Europe caught up in revolutionary change. For these painters, nature replaced rationalism as the proper source of inspiration.

A. JACQUES LOUIS DAVID, 1748-1825
See http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/david/

David was the virtual dictator of European painting during the first two decades of the 19th century. A deputy of the Convention, president of the Paris Jacobin Club, and member of the Committee of General Safety, David organized many of the great ceremonies of the Revolution, notably Robespierre's Festival of the Supreme Being, June 1794. He became a baron and court painter under Napoleon, then the restored Bourbons exiled him. No matter how revolutionary the subject, David employed traditional neoclassical techniques, stressing form, line, and perspective.

Napoleon at St. Bernard (1800)

B. FRANCISCO GOYA, 1746-1828 (THE THIRD OF MAY, 1808)
See http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/goya/
Goya's works represented Romantic temper, with their warmth, passion, and sense of outrage. No one could have any illusions about Spanish royalty after looking at Goya's revealing portraits of Charles III and his successors. When Napoleon's armies occupied Spain in 1808, Goya and many of his countrymen hoped that the conquerors would bring the liberal reforms so badly needed. The savage behavior of the French troops crushed these hopes and produced a popular resistance of equal savagery. The Third of May, 1808, commemorating the execution of a group of Madrid citizens, reflects this bitter experience.

After viewing this painting, we can understand the story that Goya made his preliminary sketches in the blood of the executed Spanish patriots whose agonies he was portraying. Its blazing color, fluid brush work, and dramatic nocturnal light endow the picture with all the emotional intensity of religious art.  Yet these martyrs are dying for Liberty, not the Kingdom of Heaven; and their executioners are not the agents of Satan but of political tyranny—a formation of faceless automatons impervious to their victims' despair and defiance. With the clairvoyance of genius, Goya has created an image that the ruthless have reenacted countless times in modern history.

C. JOHN CONSTABLE, 1776-1837 (THE HAYWAIN, 1821)
http://www.mezzo-mondo.com/arts/mm/constable/

Self-Portrait.

The Romantics, with their worship of nature, raised landscape painting to a new significance; landscape painting conveyed some of their most profoundly felt emotions.

Even as the Industrial Revolution was transforming the land, the beauties of the English countryside found their loftiest celebration in the landscapes of John Constable. In sharp contrast to that of Turner, his nature was peculiarly harmonious, well maintained, and rich in spiritual values. Constable painted gentle Wordsworthian landscapes in which human beings were at one with their environment, the comforting countryside of unspoiled rural England. The first artist of importance to paint outdoors, the bright pure colors of The Haywain had a powerful impact on young French painters like Delacroix.

 
D. JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER (CALAIS PIER, 1806)
See http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/default.htm

Whereas the English landscape artist John Constable saw nature as the manifestation of a beneficent spirit, the nature portrayed by Joseph Turner, England's other great Romantic painter, seethed with awesome uncontrollable power. The fury of the sea, a favorite subject, is evident in Calais Pier (1806). In this early painting the waves roll in higher and higher while black clouds weigh ominously on fishermen setting out to sea. Half sailor and vagabond, Turner lent seascapes unprecedented passion.

E. CASPAR DAVID FREIDRICH, 1774-1840 (MONK AT THE SEASHORE, 1808; THE WRECK OF THE HOPE, 1821)
See http://www.artunframed.com/friedrich.htm
At the heart of the Romantic impulse lay a profound desire to commune with God or what the Romantics felt to be the reality that lay behind reality as observed by the senses. This became a dreamlike longing for the indescribable and unattainable. Probably no painter expressed this mood or tasted more fully of the despair it brought than did the German, Caspar David Friedrich. With Romantic fervor he cried out against optimistic rationalists:

O, you good-natured people, who do not recognize the inner drive and tension of the soul, and want Man not as the loving God has created, coined, and stamped him, but as time and fashion will have him.

To portray the tension-ridden landscape of the soul Friedrich advised artists to: "Shut your physical eye and look first at your picture with your spiritual eye, then bring to the light of day what you have seen in the darkness." Like many soul-searching Romantics, Friedrich found God "everywhere, even in a grain of sand." But his profound melancholy, which eventually became insanity, turned what might have been joyful pantheistic visions into moody, almost sinister landscapes that fused the natural with the supernatural and beauty with despair.

The Monk at the Seashore embodies an experience central to the Romantic imagination: that of the sublime. The tiny, lonesome figure contemplating the immensity of sea and sky becomes a moving symbol of man's insignificance when confronted with the cosmos.

Friedrich in 1821 painted The Wreck of the Hope, which recorded not only the news of the foundering of a ship and the memory of his brother crushed by ice floes on the Elbe, but also his own engulfing despair.  Both this vessel and Friedrich himself were trapped in the ice, never to escape from their destiny.

F. JOSEPH MALLORD WILLIAM TURNER (THE SLAVE SHIP, 1839)
This painting dramatically tried to symbolize man's insignificance when confronted with the cosmos. First entitled Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhoon Coming On, the painting is, on one level, a protest against the inhumanity of the slave trade; threatened by a storm, the captain casts his human cargo overboard. The typhoon is nature's retribution for his greed and cruelty.  It is also more than that—a catastrophe that engulfs everything, not merely the slaver and his victims but the sea itself with its crowds of fantastic and oddly harmless-looking fish. While we sense the force of Turner's vision, most of us today tend to enjoy this explosion of color for its own sake rather than as a vehicle for the awesome emotions the artist meant to evoke.

 
G. THEODORE GERICAULT, 1791-1824 (RAFT OF THE MEDUSA)
See http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/gericault/
The French artist Theodore Gericault showed the fate of passengers from the frigate Medusa, which had foundered on the way to Senegal. The crew put the 149 passengers onto an open raft and cut them adrift at sea. A handful lived to tell the tale, and Gericault devoted his life to studying corpses so that he might capture this horrific moment of both realistic and Romantic revelation. We can also see the painting as illustrating human beings caught in great political and social forces of history on which they ride as on a turbulent ocean—a common Romantic theme.

H. EUGENE DELACROIX, 1798-1863 (LIBERTY LEADING THE PEOPLE)
See http://www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/delacroix/
The greatest and most moving Romantic painter in France was Delacroix, probably the illegitimate son of the French foreign minister Talleyrand. Delacroix claimed that the purpose of art was not to imitate nature but to strike the imagination. He was a master of dramatic, colorful scenes that stir the emotions. He was fascinated with remote and exotic subjects, whether lion hunts in Morocco or the languishing, sensuous women of a sultan's harem. Yet he was also a passionate spokesman for freedom. His masterpiece, Liberty Leading the People, celebrated the nobility of popular revolution in general and revolution in France in particular. By the 1830s, French painters had divided into opposing schools: the still-influential disciples of David and the Romantic followers of Delacroix.

Liberty Leading the People: This great romantic painting glorifies the July Revolution in Paris in 1830. Raising high the revolutionary tricolor, Liberty unites the worker, bourgeois, and street child in a righteous crusade against privilege and oppression.
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Massacre at Chios: The Greek struggle for freedom and independence won the enthusiastic support of liberals, nationalists, and Romantics. They saw the Ottoman Turks as cruel oppressors holding back the course of history, as in this powerful masterpiece by Delacroix.
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Death of Sardanapalus: So many Romantic themes—the dramatic moment, the exotic, the cruel, the beautiful, and death
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I. ARCHITECTURE
In architecture, two schools flourished during the first half of the 19th century:
1. The Neoclassical, looking to Greek and Roman antiquity.
2. The Neo-Gothic or Gothic Revival, looking to the Middle Ages.

Many architects mastered both styles, adapting them to the needs and tastes of the day. Generally, basic design was classical in its proportions, while medieval in decoration. The Houses of Parliament in London, rebuilt in the 1830s and 1840s after a fire, were Gothic in their spires and towers but embodied classical principles of balance and symmetry. Thomas Jefferson exemplified the use of classical proportions.

IV. AN AGE OF FEELING, POETRY, MUSIC AND THE PAST, 1790-1830
A. JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, 1749-1832
Goethe was a good 18th-century exponent of reason, interested in natural science and comfortably established in the Grand Duchy of Weimar, an enlightened small German state detached from political passions sweeping Germany in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Age.

Yet Romantic values lie at the heart of his most famous writings—his short lyrics and in Faust, the greatest work in the German language. Begun when Goethe was in his 20s and finished when he was 80, Faust is a long poetic drama and philosophical commentary on the main currents in European thought. According to the traditional legend, the aged Faust, weary of book learning and pining for eternal youth, sold his soul to the Devil.  He received the joy of his youth for an allotted time, but he becomes terror-stricken at the thought of going to the everlasting fires.

Goethe partially transformed the legend. Faust makes his same pact with Mephistopheles, who points out how disillusioning intellectual pursuits are; but Faust finally finds salvation through his realization that he must sacrifice selfish concerns to the welfare of others. A drama of sinning, striving, and redemption, Goethe's Faust reaffirmed the Christian values that the Enlightenment had belittled. (Compare this to the American Faust stories.)

B. ENGLISH POETS
1. LORD BYRON, 1788-1824
Born with a deformed foot, fatherless at three, heir to a barony and a Gothic abbey at six, tortured by a sadistic quack, seduced by his nurse, subjected to the violent outbursts of his dour Scots mother, and possessed by a tempestuous mind, young Byron suffered much.  He considered himself a fallen angel, a miscreant Mephistopheles. At the age of 21, he had left England for the Mediterranean where he swam the Hellespont, chatted with the sultan in Constantinople, and crossed Albania with an outlaw chieftain. London's ladies found Byron (like Michael Jackson?) "mad, bad, and dangerous," but swore in the next breath, "That beautiful pale face is my fate."

One scandal followed another, including probable incest and a disastrous marriage. Gossip turned to outrage. In 1816 Byron left England never to return. Abroad, the fallen angel wrote and lived as extravagantly and brilliantly as ever, laying bare "the pageant of his bleeding heart" and rebelling against hypocrisy and tyranny wherever he found them.

The strongest link between the revolutionaries of the first half of the 19th century and the Romantic Movement was in Philhellenism, the Movement supporting the Greek War for independence against the Turks. At the age of 36, "a young, old man," as he put it, Byron sought and found a hero's death in 1824 while aiding the rebellious Greeks against their Turkish masters.

He also pilloried Alexander I of Russia, a one-time Enlightened despot and liberal reformer who had backslid into traditional Russian obscurantism:

Now half dissolving to a liberal thaw,
But hardened back whene'er the morning's raw;
With no objection to true liberty,
Except that it would make the nations free.

2. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, 1792-1822
Shelley was another passionate supporter of the Greek war. His wife was Mary Shelly, the author of Frankenstein, a quintessentially Romantic novel. In 1817 he captured the Romantic sense of despair in his poem Ozymandias, which states anew the biblical warning that the overweening ambitions of arrogant humanity would be as dust to dust.

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of kings:
Look on my works, yet Mighty and despair."
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

3. WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1770-1850
A towering leader of English Romanticism, Wordsworth traveled in France after his graduation from Cambridge. There he fell passionately in love with a French woman, who bore him a daughter. The philosophy of Rousseau and the spirit of the early French Revolution deeply influenced him. Back in England, prevented by war and the Terror from returning to France, Wordsworth settled in the countryside with his sister Dorothy and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

In 1798, the two poets published their Lyrical Ballads, one of the most influential literary works in the history of the English language. In defiance of classical rules, Wordsworth and Coleridge abandoned flowery poetic conventions for the language of ordinary speech, simultaneously endowing simple subjects with the loftiest majesty. This twofold rejection of classical practice was at first ignored and then harshly criticized, but by 1830 Wordsworth had triumphed. In his reaction against classicism and rationalism, Wordsworth commanded that Nature be our teacher:

Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.

One impulse from a vernal wood.
May teach you more of man.
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.

Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
His-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
We murder to dissect.

Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.

One of the best examples of Wordsworth's Romantic credo and genius is Daffodils:

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky War.
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
I in vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

Here indeed are simplicity and love of nature in commonplace forms. Here, too, is Wordsworth's Romantic conviction that nature has the power to elevate and instruct, especially when interpreted by a high-minded poetic genius. The last stanza illustrates Wordsworth's conception of poetry as the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling recollected in tranquillity."

4. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE, 1772-1834
Coleridge also pushed to the limits the revolt against classicism and rationalism in the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, and Kubla Khan, the latter dealing in surrealism and drugs.

C. THE RETURN TO THE PAST
1. NATIONALISM
The Romantics' enthusiasm for the Middle Ages in general and for the earlier history of their own nations in particular, linked the universal (nature) to the particular (the nation-state). Nationalism was an emotional, mystical force. The heightened sense of nationalism evident almost everywhere in Europe by 1815 was in part a response to Napoleon's invasions. The Romantic return to the national past, however, had begun before 1789 as part of the repudiation of the Enlightenment. The pioneers of Romanticism tended to cherish what the philosophes detested, the Middle Ages and religion.

2. JOHANN GOTTFRIED VON HERDER, 1744-1803
The German writer von Herder provided intellectual justification for medieval studies with his theory of cultural nationalism. Each separate Volksgeist, or "folk spirit" had its own pattern of growth. The surest measure of a nation's progress was its literature—poetry in youth, prose in maturity. Stimulated by Herder, students of medieval German literature collected popular ballads and folktales. By valuing German literature of the past, Herder helped free German literature of his own day from its bondage to French culture.

3. SIR WALTER SCOTT, 1771-1832
Born in Edinburgh, Scott personified the Romantic Movement's fascination with history. Raised on his grandfather's farm, Scott fell under the spell of the old ballads and tales of the Scottish border. He was also deeply influenced by German Romanticism, particularly by Goethe. Scott translated Goethe's famous Gotz von Berlichingern, a play about a 16th-century knight who revolted against centralized authority and championed individual freedom—at least in Goethe's Romantic drama.

A natural storyteller, Scott collected medieval British folk ballads and wrote more than 30 historical novels, of which Ivanhoe, set in the days of Richard the Lionhearted and the Crusades, is the best known. Scott excelled in faithfully recreating the spirit of bygone ages and great historical events, especially those of Scotland. He was especially popular in the antebellum South of the United States.

4. ALEXANDER PUSHKIN, 1799-1837
The Shakespeare and Dante of the Russian language, he deserted the Slavonic language of the Orthodox Church to write the first major Russian literary works in the vernacular: Boris Godunov, 1831, and Evgeny Onegin, 1832. He took his subjects from Russia's past and introduced local color from the newly acquired Crimea and Caucasus. He also celebrated his own great grandfather, Hannibal, a Black African/Ethiopian slave who rose to be a general in Peter the Great's army. Pushkin died defending his honor in a duel, a terribly Romantic thing.

5. VICTOR HUGO, 1802-85
Son of a Napoleonic general, Hugo achieved an amazing range of rhythm, language, and image in his lyric poetry. His powerful novels exemplified the Romantic fascination with fantastic characters, strange settings, and human emotions. The hero of Hugo's famous Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) is the great cathedral's deformed bell ringer, a "human gargoyle" overlooking the teeming life of the 15th-century Paris of Louis XI. A great admirer of Shakespeare, whom classical critics had derided as undisciplined and excessive, Hugo also championed Romanticism in drama. His play Hernani (1830) consciously broke all the old rules, as Hugo renounced his early conservatism and equated freedom in literature with liberty in politics and society. Hugo's political evolution was thus exactly the opposite of Wordsworth's, in whom youthful radicalism gave way to middle-aged caution. As the contrast between the two artists suggests, Romanticism was a cultural movement compatible with many political beliefs.

6. GEORGE SAND (AMANDINE AURORE LUCIE DUPIN), 1804-1876
Sand was a strong-willed and gifted woman, who defied the narrow conventions of her time in an unending search for self-fulfillment. After 8 years of unhappy marriage in the provinces, she abandoned her dullard of a husband and took her two children to Paris to pursue a career as a writer. There Sand soon achieved fame and wealth, eventually writing over 80 novels on various Romantic and social themes. All were shot through with a typically Romantic love of nature and moral idealism. Sand's striking individualism went far beyond her flamboyant preference for men's clothing and cigars and her notorious affairs with the poet Alfred de Musset and the composer Frederic Chopin, among others. Her semi-autobiographical novel Lélia was shockingly modern, delving deeply into her tortuous quest for sexual and personal freedom. (OK, she doesn't really represent a return to the past in the same way these others do.)

7. JACOB AND WILHELM GRIMM
In central and eastern Europe, literary Romanticism and early nationalism often reinforced each other. Seeking a unique greatness in every people, well-educated Romantics plumbed their own histories and cultures. Like modern anthropologists, they turned their attention to peasant life and transcribed the folk songs, tales, and proverbs that the cosmopolitan Enlightenment had disdained. The Grimm brothers were especially successful at rescuing German fairy tales from oblivion.

8. ALEKSANDR NIKOLAYEVICH AFAN'SEV, 1826-71
Afan'sev was a lawyer by education and the Russian counterpart of the Grimm brothers. His collections of folklore, published from 1866 on, were instrumental in introducing Russian popular tales to world literature. One such tale:

Baba Yaga and the Brave Youth
Once upon a time there lived a cat, a sparrow, and a brave youth. The cat and the sparrow went to the forest to chop wood and said to the brave youth: "You keep the house, but mind you: if Baba Yaga comes and counts the spoons, do not say a word, keep quiet!: Very well," said the brave youth. The cat and the sparrow went away, and the brave youth sat on the stove behind the chimney. Suddenly Baba Yaga came in, took the spoons, and began to count them: "This is the cat's spoon, this is the sparrow's spoon, and this is the brave youth's spoon." The brave youth could not restrain himself and cried: "Baba Yaga, don't touch may spoon!" Baba Yaga seized the brave youth, sat on the mortar, and flew off; she drove the mortar, spurring it with the pestle and sweeping away her tracks with her boom. The brave youth shouted: "Cat, run! Sparrow, fly!: They heard him and rushed to his help. The cat began to scratch Baba Yaga and the sparrow to peck at her; thus they rescued the brave youth.

The next day the cat and the sparrow again prepared to go to the forest to chop wood, and told the brave youth: "Mind you, if Baba Yaga comes, do not say anything; today we are going far away." As soon as the brave youth had sat down on the stove behind the chimney, Baba Yaga came again, and again began to count the spoons: "This is the cat's spoon, this is the sparrow's spoon, and this is the brave youth's spoon." The brave youth could not restrain himself and shouted: "Baba Yaga, don't touch my spoon!" Baba Yaga seized the brave youth and dragged him with her. The brave youth shouted: "Cat, run! Sparrow, fly!" They heard him and rushed to his help. The cat began to scratch and the sparrow to peck at Baba Yaga. Thus they rescued the brave youth. Then they all went home.

The third day the cat and the sparrow prepared once more to go to the forest and chop wood, and they said to the brave youth: "Mind you, if Baba Yaga comes, be silent; today we are going even farther." The cat and the sparrow left, and the brave youth sat on the stove behind the chimney. Suddenly Baba Yaga again took the spoons and began to count them: "This is the cat's spoon, this is the sparrow's spoon, this is the brave youth's spoon." The brave youth did not say a word. Baba Yaga counted again: "This is the cat's spoon, this is the sparrow's spoon, and this is the brave youth's spoon. "The brave youth did not say a word. Baba Yaga counted a third time: "This is the cat's spoon, this is the sparrow's spoon, and this is the brave youth's spoon." The brave youth could not restrain himself any longer and cried loudly: "Don't touch my spoon!" Baba Yaga seized the brave youth and dragged him with her. He cried: "Cat, run! Sparrow, fly!" But his brothers did not hear him. Baba Yaga took him home, put him in the wooden shed by the stove, made a fire in the stove, and said to her eldest daughter: "I am going to Russia. Meanwhile, roast this brave youth for my dinner." "Very well," said the daughter.

The stove grew hot and the girl told the brave youth to come out of the shed. He came out. "Lie down on the roasting pan," said the girl. He lay down, held up one of his feet so that it touched the ceiling, and put the other on the floor. The girl said: "Not that way, not that way!" The brave youth said: "How then? Show me." The girl lay down on the roasting pan. The brave youth quickly seized an oven fork, pushed the pan with Baba Yaga's daughter on it into the oven, and went back into the shed to wait for Baba Yaga. Suddenly she ran in and said: "Now I am going to feast and regale myself on the brave youth's bones!" The brave youth answered her: "Feast and regale yourself on your own daughter's bones!" Baba Yaga was startled and looked into the oven. She found her daughter all roasted, and roared: "Aha, you cheat, just wait, you won't get away!" She ordered her second daughter to roast the brave youth and went away.

Her second daughter made a fire in the stove and told the brave youth to come out. He came out, lay on the pan, put one foot on the ceiling and the other on the floor. The girl said: "Not that way, not that way!" "Show me how." The girl lay on the pan. The brave youth shoved her into the oven, went back to the shed, and sat there. Suddenly he heard Baba Yaga crying: "Now I am going to feat and regale myself on the brave youth's bones!" He answered: "Feast and regale yourself on your own daughter's bones!" Baba Yaga flew into a rage: "Eh," she said, "Just wait, you won't get away!"

She ordered her youngest daughter to roast him, but to no avail; the brave youth shoved her into the oven too. Baba Yaga flew into an even greater rage: "Now," she said, "this time I swear you won't get away!" She made a fire in the stove and cried: "Come out, brave youth, lied on the pan!" He lay down, touched the ceiling with one foot, the floor with the other, and thus could not be got into the oven. Baba Yaga said: "Not that way, not that way!" And the brave youth still pretended that he did not know how. "I don't know how," he said. "Show me." Baba Yaga at once curled up and lay on the pan. The brave youth quickly shoved her into the oven, ran home, and said to his brothers: "That's what I did with Baba Yaga!

D. MUSIC
1. THE IDEA
Romantic musicians sought out the popular ballads and tales of the national past; they also sought to free their compositions from classical rules. For color and drama, composers of opera and song turned to literature: Shakespeare's plays, Scott's novels, Byron's poetry, the tales and poetry of Goethe and Pushkin. Although literature and music often took similar paths during the Romantic era, there were significant differences. Romantic musicians did not revolt against the great 18th-century composers.

Rather, Romantic music evolved out of the older classical school. Whereas the composers of the 18th century had remained true to well-defined structures, like the classical symphony, the great Romantics used a great range of forms to create a thousand musical landscapes and evoke a host of powerful emotions. Romantic composers also transformed the small classical orchestra, tripling its size by adding wind instruments, percussion, and more brass and strings. Yet it was in music that Romanticism realized most fully and permanently its goals of free expression and emotional intensity.

This range and intensity gave music and musicians much greater prestige than in the past. Music no longer simply complemented a church service or helped a nobleman digest his dinner. Music became a sublime end in itself. It became for many the greatest of the arts, precisely because it achieved the most ecstatic effect and most perfectly realized the endless yearnings of the soul. It was worthy of great concert halls and the most dedicated sacrifice. The great virtuoso who could transport the listener to ecstasy and hysteria became a cultural hero.

2. LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN, 1770-1827
Beethoven was the composer who played the commanding role in this evolution. He lived most of his life in Vienna. He tried to add feeling to his music. Breaking open the classical forms, Beethoven used contrasting themes and tones to produce dramatic conflict and inspiring resolutions. As the contemporary German novelist Ernst Hoffmann wrote, "Beethoven's music sets in motion the lever of fear, of awe, of horror, of suffering, and awakens just the infinite longing which is the essence of Romanticism."

Part of the color and passion of Beethoven's works derive from his skill in exploiting the resources of the piano, an instrument perfected during his lifetime. He also used more instruments—especially winds, percussion, and double basses—than was traditional. In his Ninth, and final, symphony, Beethoven introduced a chorus in the last movement to sing his setting of Schiller's Ode to Joy. His Ruins of Athens shows Romanticism's tie to Greece and revolution. Also Romantic is the bottomless despair of the funeral march in the Third Symphony.

At the peak of his fame, in constant demand as a composer and recognized as the leading concert pianist of his day, Beethoven began to lose his hearing. He considered suicide but eventually overcame despair: "I will take fate by the throat; it will not bend me completely to its will." Beethoven continued to pour out immortal music. He never heard much of his later work, including the unforgettable choral finale to the Ninth Symphony, for his last years were silent, spent in total deafness.

3. HECTOR BERLIOZ, 1803-69
Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique and his Requiem called for orchestras of heroic sizes. He brought dramatic personality to the podium.

4. FRANZ SCHUBERT, 1797-1828
Blended the voice and piano.

5. MIKHAIL GLINKA, 1804-1857
Glinka cast aside the Italian influences that had dominated the secular music Russia, to base his opera Russlan and Ludmilla, 1842, on a poem by Pushkin, embellishing it with dances derived from Asiatic Russia.

6. FREDERIC CHOPIN, 1810-49
The most Romantic of all was the Polish composer, Chopin. Writing almost exclusively for the piano and drawing heavily on the melodic forms of Polish popular music, Chopin best combined Romantic music with national idioms, especially in his polonaises, which he wrote to accompany a Polish dance. His work was technically demanding, while passionate and stirring, and he made the piano the most popular instrument of the century. His Revolutionary Etudes continue to symbolize Polish nationalism.

IV. RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY
A. RELIGION
The pope's reestablishment in 1814 of the Jesuit Order institutionally marked the Romantic religious revival.  Many had seen the suppression of the Jesuits in 1773 as one of the Enlightenment’s great victories. On the whole, the religious skepticism of the Philosophes horrified the Romantics. Shelley, an atheist, was the exception. Catholicism gained many converts among Romantic writers, especially in Germany, and the Protestants also made gains. Pietism found new strength in Germany and Russia. In England, Coleridge vigorously defended the established church, while also introducing the new German Idealist philosophy.

B. GEORG W. F. HEGEL, 1770-1831
1. GERMAN IDEALISM
Intellectuals of the 1820s-40s turned enthusiastically to the theories of Schelling and Hegel and extracted that part which they needed.

a. The Mind as a Creative Force
The principal effect of Idealism was that it transformed the mind from a mere recipient of sensory knowledge into an active participant in the process of cognition. The manner in which intelligence, through its inbuilt categories, perceived reality was in itself an essential attribute of that reality. For them the human mind became the supreme creative force. Ideas were every bit as real as were physical facts.

b. Dynamic Element to Philosophy
Idealism also injected into philosophy a dynamic element. It saw reality, both spiritual and material, as undergoing constant evolution, as ‘becoming’ rather than ‘being'. This gives the intelligentsia the assurance that the reality that happens to surround them—and in varying degrees which they repudiated—is by the very nature of things transitory, a stepping-stone to something superior. Any contradiction between ideas and reality simply means that reality has not yet caught up with ideas. Failure is always temporary for ideologues, and success for the powers that be is always illusory.  This confidence lent incredible power to revolutionaries of both the left and the right in the twentieth century.

2. DIALECTIC
Chief among the Romantic German philosophers was Hegel, a follower of Kant and a professor at the University of Berlin. Like Kant, Hegel attacked the Enlightenment's tendency to see in human nature and history only what met the eye. Human history, properly understood, was the history of efforts to gain the good, and this in turn was the unfolding of God's plan for the world.

For Hegel, history is "ideas in motion," a dialectical process.  That is, history is a series of conflicts with two contending elements.  They were the thesis—the established order of life, the idea of being—and the antithesis—a challenge to the old order, the idea of non-being. Out of the struggle of thesis and antithesis emerges a synthesis.  It is no mere compromise between thesis and antithesis, but a new and better way—the idea of becoming.  The combination is another step in humanity's slow progress toward the best of all possible worlds. In turn, the synthesis breaks down by becoming conventional and unproductive; it becomes locked in conflict with a new antithesis, and the dialectic produces another synthesis. And so on and so on.

3. EXAMPLE
The death of the Roman Republic allowed Hegel to show the dialectic at work. The decadent Republic represented the thesis, despotism the antithesis and the Caesarism of the early Roman Empire the synthesis. Hegel explained this change was not a thing of chance; it was necessary, a part of God's grand design. Julius Caesar was a hero—i.e., he had an insight into the requirements of the time, and he knew what was ripe for development. This concept of the hero as the agent of a cosmic process is another characteristic of the Romantic temper.

4. INFLUENCE
The dialectical philosophy of history was the most original and influential element in Hegel's thought; it would help shape the dialectical materialism of Karl Marx. Still, Hegel was once even more famous as a liberal idealist. His emphasis on duty, his choice of Alexander the Great, Caesar, and Napoleon as "world-historical" heroes, his assertion that the state exists for its own sake—all suggest a link with authoritarianism. Yet, Hegel foresaw the final synthesis of the dialectic not as a brutal police state, but as a liberalized version of the Prussian monarchy.

V. THE ROMANTIC STYLE
A. OPTIMISM AND COSMOPOLITANISM
Thus Hegel, like the philosophes, believed in progress and in human perfectibility, though he also believed that the process would need far more time and struggle than Enlightenment optimists imagined. Indeed, the Romantic style was not totally at variance with the Enlightenment's; not only a modified doctrine of progress, but also 18th-century cosmopolitanism lived on into the 19th century.

B. STYLE
Despite these similarities and continuities, Romanticism did have a style of its own—imaginative, emotional, and haunted by the supernatural, the terrific (in the sense of inspiring awe and terror), and by history. History was, as Herder and Hegel argued, an organic process of growth and development indebted to the Middle Ages for magnificent Gothic buildings, religious enthusiasm, folk ballads, and heroic epics.

Just as the Romantics rejected the Enlightenment's view of the past, so they found the Newtonian world-machine an entirely inadequate interpretation of the universe. It was too static, too drab and materialistic. In its place they put a neo-Gothic world of religious mystery, the Hegelian mechanics of dialectic and heroes, the poetic and artistic vision of feeling, color, and impulses in nature. The Romantics wanted to recreate a sense of wonder, to inspire a belief in the essential unity of God, man, and nature, to show that humanity lives in a world of endless "becoming."

C. DEATH
As in the early Middle Ages, death once again fascinated Europeans—especially dying heroically, for one's ideals or nation, in defense of home, or to achieve a dramatic purpose. Two hugely popular paintings of the time captured the fusion, the chill of pleasure down the spine that merged Romanticism and social realism. One, by a German Romantic landscape painter, Caspar David Friedrich, depicted the wreck of the Hope, a vessel trapped in ice, never to escape from its destiny. Another, by the French artist Theodore Gericault showed the fate of passengers from the frigate Medusa. He devoted his life to studying corpses so that he might capture this horrific moment of both realistic and Romantic revelation.

This was the age of great cemeteries, laid out in rows with huge mausoleums, where relatives and friends could gather around the graves. Byron had a Romantic death; in the minds of liberals and radicals, conservatives and counter-revolutionaries, one must defend one's principles to the death—as Byron did. The Italian revolutionary leader Mazzini listed six causes worth dying for: liberty, equality, nationality, conscience, individuality, fatherland. In time, contradictions between these abstract principles would emerge.

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